Merry Christmas!

Things I love about Christmas this year:

The Church's "He Is the Gift" campaign
All the gifts I made/assembled (future post for the sewing blog)
The Christmas lesson taught in RS last Sunday
The kids' matching Christmas outfits (from Mom before Owen was even born)
The round lights on our Christmas tree
The "Angels We Have Heard on High" video done by the Piano Guys and David Archuleta (and some other guy I don't know)
That the gift Camille is most excited about is one she is giving to Owen
All the time Brian has off

We're trying to see how many times Santa can scare Camille.

And no Christmas is complete without random gifts left on the porch from Jane to the Hurtados. This year we got a string of fiber optic dragonflies and a Backwoods Home Cooking cookbook.

A long and kind of boring post

We made it through the long drive over the river and through the woods to Grandpa's house for Thanksgiving. The kids were okay in the car, and we managed to go the whole way there without buying anything except gas on the way. We enjoyed stopping at Grandma Allred's house for the night on the way there. It made a long first day, but Grandma was nice enough to stay up till we got in at 11:30 pm and then feed us before we went to bed. Camille really liked Grandmas's Little People collection. Who doesn't? The second day was supposed to be short, but the eight hour trip morphed into eleven due to kids, traffic, and snowy roads.

I had fun spending time with the family, and Camille had lots of fun playing with the cousins. I'm especially glad Brooke woke up at 6:00 every morning so I could just send Camille down to play with her while I tried to go back to sleep.

The Eastbay Turkey Trot was COLD. Brian and the kiddos chilled out (ha) in the car while we froze running around downtown Wausau. Nine degrees (or was it twelve?) was a mite on the chilly side.

Brian took a picture of the this random guy that Camille kept calling Grandpa.

Sorry. Brian didn't see any of the other runners in our family.

Russell photo bomb

In the past twelve months we have made the trip to Wisconsin four times. I don't know why I felt compelled to go for Thanksgiving after just being there in August, but I did, and we went. We'll probably take a little break and not go back for awhile. We are also to the point where we will probably not travel for holidays very much anymore.

Dad sent us home with the hind quarter of one of the deer he got. We had the fun experience of butchering it ourselves.

We got our Christmas tree up. It is ridiculously bushy around the bottom and seemed to swallow up all the lights, so I bought more. I'm trying out white lights on the tree for the first time. The verdict is still out on whether I prefer white or colored more.

It is also lost a lot of needles when I was putting the lights on (and pulling them off again).

Well, there is my monthly update.